Gift selection can be a daunting task because of the essentially personal nature of the activity. Gift givers are often intimidated by the prospect of selecting a gift that is not pleasing to the recipient. Even for those givers who are able to discern how a particular gift will be perceived by the recipient, the challenge of selecting, procuring, and delivering such a gift may be time consuming, expensive, and/or stressful.
The advent of online shopping and auctions has, to a certain degree, simplified the tasks of procuring and delivering gift items. However, the sheer volume of goods and services that may be searched via the worldwide web may complicate, rather than simplify, the gift selection process. Some attempts have been made to automate decision support for gift selection, but these implementations have been largely directed to “collaborative filtering,” defined as making generalized gift recommendations based on collecting taste information from many users and/or prior purchasing patterns. Such gift selection solutions suffer from the shortcomings of not truly “personalizing” the gift selection, of not being based on known likes and dislikes of the recipient, and of not reflecting the nature of the relationship between the giver and recipient.
Alternative to selecting a gift, one approach to personalizing a gift is employment of word art. As used herein, word art (also known as word clouds) may be defined as a collection of words that make up an image. Certain automated implementations known in the art attempt to personalize giftable goods by applying word art to such goods. The word art may include decorative representations of words (such as family names) that have personal meaning to the recipient.
PersonalizationMall.com® offers a “Her Heart of Love Personalized Christmas Cookie Jar,” which features a white cookie jar emblazoned with a heart shape made up of word art formed from consumer-specified names. However, the consumer is limited by the web-based system to only eight names. Nor is the consumer offered any selectable word art choices for shape, font, or color choice. Nor is the consumer allowed to specify any symbols.
YouFrameCanvas.com (also referred to as YFCanvas.com) offers a text montage printed to a canvas. However, the consumer is offered no preview of the work art including the consumer-specified words, nor selectable choices for symbol, text orientation, and text color. Nor does the produced canvas feature full wrap at the edges.
The word art builder of Yourperfectcanvas.com empowers a consumer to select shapes, fonts, colors to create a one off original design. The user may repeat the design process and preview as many times as desired before ordering. However, the user cannot save previews between sessions, and is limited to up to 150 words per design, and the pop-up menus for design parameters is cumbersome to use.
Photographicgifts.com offers a personalized word art print illustrated with an image of a castle atop a hill. Set within the walls of the castle are a collection of consumer-specified words. The consumer is offered a choice of colors. The resultant print may be produced, along with a variety of colored frames and a plastic sheet for protection. However, this implementation offers the consumer no preview, and only rudimentary overlapping options.
Beyondaword.com.au offers personalized canvas art produced to customer selections of system-specified canvas size, shape, background color, multiple type colors, and font style from many choices. However, the custom art object options of the consumer are limited to words and photographs.
Tagxedo.com is a pure word art creator (no emblazoning on various media to produce giftable goods). Therefore, this implementation offers the consumer less extensive customization and pre-set parameters. However, Tagxedo.com does include some application-specific features, such as using a consumer's Facebook® profile to generate a personal word-art image.
What is needed is a product that is not only capable of collecting personal information about an intended recipient of a gift and then automatically creating a personalized work of art as the gift, but also that is rich in design capabilities without sacrificing ease of use. Such a system would be capable of creating the personalized work of art either as a stand-alone good (either digital or physical), or as a work of art produced in combination with a physical gift item. The system should also support both pre-set and user-custom art objects that may be easily layered by a layman user to create production-quality artwork. More specifically, such a system should allow consumer specification of art objects including outline shape (including overlays), design elements (including orientation), and medium setting (including both regular and irregular display surfaces). The system should allow the consumer to quickly and easily preview multiple iterations of a design in progress, and also to save previews between sessions. Such a system should respond to acceptance of a design in progress by automatically processing a purchase transaction, optionally upselling to the consumer, and spawning the production of good, as ordered, that features the design. The system should also be available both to direct consumers and also through third parties by virtue of an application programming interface (API)
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.